So what exactly does this mean to you?
There are competing interests that want different outcomes on the value of the diamond:
Producers - those who provide inventory in exchange for an increase in stockpiled wealth - drive the value of the diamond to go low. Their goal is getting the most diamonds for as little produced items as possible.
Consumers - those who use diamonds as a means to an end to acquire a desired good - drive the value to go high. Opposite to producers, their goal is getting as much produced items for a diamond as possible.
Staff: they don’t care of the value be it high or low, but are more interested in keeping the % change bounded within reason to the original value of the diamond (or at least their perceived value of it), so there is a high frequency of stable trades going on.
An active economy means an active community, with players having reasonable access to items to do whatever suits their fancy. If the value of the diamond ever shoots up or plummets, trade frequency will drop and the economy stagnates as more and more consumers don’t see value in spending their diamonds on what they perceive as outrageous prices, save only the very wealthy who could keep up, or producers stop producing because they don’t want to make something that they feel doesn’t fairly compensate them for their time creating the inventory. As a result, the community activity slows and as a corollary, the onus defaults to the staff to step up to reactivate the economy through direct intervention (a consuming task).
The trend on the value of the diamond shows to meet most of everyone’s interests, with the biggest winners being the early shops, as they are able to cash in on the lower value of the diamonds they’ve stockpiled when it was still a relatively high value.
I should add that with the introduction of the lottery system and potentially many other future staff endeavors that stem from it, where diamonds and other desired goods are redistributed among players (or possibly taken out altogether), will have an interesting impact to the economy, because if managed properly, could further stimulate the economy through increased trading from those previously lacking currency to buy desired goods in bulk. I wish I could have the time to continue this study to see what comes of it.
I hoped this was a good read for you, I had fun doing it, and surprisingly it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Hopefully someone is able to see ways this study can be improved or continued and provide us with another updated reference. But at the very least this can be used as a reference of what a free economy looks like at the startup of a new map.